“Find a need and fill it.” That’s great advice in a capitalist society and it’s how many people have gotten rich while improving other’s lives.

Al Gore has a different twist on that adage: Use false data to create an artificial need, and then fill that need using pork:

The man who was within sight of the presidency 12 years ago has transformed himself, becoming perhaps the world’s most renowned crusader on climate change and a highly successful green-tech investor.

Just before leaving public office in 2001, Gore reported assets of less than $2 million; today, his wealth is estimated at $100 million.

[snip]

Fourteen green-tech firms in which Gore invested received or directly benefited from more than $2.5 billion in loans, grants and tax breaks, part of President Obama’s historic push to seed a U.S. renewable-energy industry with public money.

Please understand that I value a clean environment. But proposing solutions for dealing with pollution is not how Gore got rich. Gore got rich by creating an artificial panic structured around his hysterical insistence that human activity was turning the earth into a giant oven. That’s fraud. And using taxpayer created slush funds to fund his boondoggle is indecent — and it’s also Progressive politics as usual.

Already back in the 70s, when the “natural” movement began, my Mom was cautious. As she liked to say, “hemlock is also a natural substance.” Her point was that nature can be cruel, and that people who assumed that things untouched by human hands were automatically better were foolish and potentially dangerous. The bee in my bonnet with the natural foodies is their belief that pasteurization destroys foods. Showing their profound ignorance of history, they have no idea that, before Louis Pasteur, thousands of children died every year from the dangerous bacterias in food. Any slight diminution in the nutritional value of milk (and it’s not clear that this diminution affects us in any way) is more than offset by the fact that we don’t die from drinking milk.

The study published in the journal Foodborne Pathogens and Disease that brought these findings to light last year sampled more than 600 pigs in North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin. It discovered not only higher rates of salmonella in free-range pigs (54 percent versus 39 percent) but also greater levels of the pathogen toxoplasma (6.8 percent versus 1.1 percent) and, most alarming, two free-range pigs that carried the parasite trichina (as opposed to zero for confined pigs). For many years, the pork industry has been assuring cooks that a little pink in the pork is fine. Trichinosis, which can be deadly, was assumed to be history.

Agricultural scientists have long known that even meticulously managed free-range environments subject farm animals to a spectrum of infection. This study, though, brings us closer to a more concrete idea of why the free-range option can pose a heightened health threat to consumers. Just a little time outdoors increases pigs’ interaction with rats and other wildlife and even with domesticated cats, which can carry transmittable diseases, as well as contact with moist soil, where pathogens find an environment conducive to growth. The natural dangers that motivated farmers to bring animals into tightly controlled settings in the first place haven’t gone away.

I suggest you read the whole op-ed. Frankly, I don’t know how it got into the New York Times, because it’s informed, rational, humane, human in its outlook, and sensible. Clearly, some editor slipped up and can soon expect to receive his (or her) pink slip.